Blender crashes during bake
This may be standard practice but it works for me so I wanted to post it here. It seems that Blender looks at the render layer settings when baking.  I have a bunch of detail in my file (wall framing, interior trim, furniture etc.) that doesn't effect the baked texture on, for instance, exterior walls.  



so when I bake the exterior wall texture I exclude those items in the render layer panel.  This seems to have eliminated the crashing problem. It's just important to be sure that none of the excluded layers would have contributed to the bake.  In this case the exterior lighting casts shadow on the walls so that layer isn't excluded.  There may be better ways of handling this but this is what I have found that works for me.